Tom Martin: Old beater’ reflects life, heritage

My pickup truck is now officially a “beater.” If the front license plate, which hangs at a 45-degree angle, doesn’t give it away, the rust over the rear tires does.

Tom Martin

My pickup truck is now officially a “beater.” If the front license plate, which hangs at a 45-degree angle, doesn’t give it away, the rust over the rear tires does.

The 1994 Ford Ranger is all mine. I paid it off more than six years ago, long after most would have traded up for something newer. It’s my mode of transportation to work, 11 blocks away, and around town, but sometimes I depend on it for longer trips.

On Thursday I needed it to deliver me 120 miles to Springfield for the annual newspaper convention. Our long distance vehicle, i.e. the mommy mobile, was needed at home to transport our two young sons.

I was a little concerned the old beast wouldn’t get me there, but the only other option was to rent a car, so I took my chances. The ride was hot — the truck’s never had air conditioning — and it was a sunny 86 degrees out.

I’m not sure at what point my vehicle became a clunker. Dilapidation is a slow, anti-climactic process. But as I pulled onto the highway Thursday, I began looking at the evidence. I realized the truck is like a deteriorating museum of the past 12 years of my life.

A cigarette burn directly above my head is a reminder of when I used to smoke (seven years ago). Now I’m chubby as a toad, but cigarette free. And that burn hole in the gray ceiling of the truck cab is overshadowed now by a half-dozen tears above the passenger’s seat. Those are from hauling gear for my rock bands over the years.

The 4-cylinder truck was plum-colored when I bought it in 1995, but now it’s taken on a gray dullness, like the eyes of a dog beginning to go blind. Part of the cause is that I haven’t washed it since the Clinton administration, a tribute to my neglect.

In the bed of the pickup is the spare tire with a ripped open bag of sand serving as ballast. The spare tire is supposed to fit nicely under the bed of the truck, but after changing a flat tire about 10 years ago, I didn’t take the time to put it back. Then I lost the long screw that held it in place. The spare tire’s been in the bed ever since. And the sand is from one of eight sand bags I bought during a snowstorm in January 1998 so I could cover the storm for the newspaper.

On the front quarter panel on the passenger’s side, splotches of paint are missing, allowing a lighter colored undercoat to show through. The quarter panel was replaced in 1996 after an antlered deer charged my truck on a gravel road. That was the gravel road of my childhood, the same one I walked to school on during good weather when I was 8 years old. When the deer plowed into me, I was driving home from the newspaper office to the farmhouse I grew up in.

That’s the same gravel road on which my dad drove a series of beaters. I always thought driving a clunker was my choice — a rebellion against a society that values new and expensive over old and practical. But, as it turns out I’m just walking in my father’s path. It’s ironic how we make fun of our parents and then become them.

Dad drove three different beater trucks and a couple beater cars over that road. He used one of the cars — a green and white 1955 Buick, which by the 1970s had seen its better days — as a farm truck.

Just the other day, I heard the story about Dad pulling up to the nearest town's only stoplight in the Buick. Upon further inspection the storyteller noticed the dingy white face of a pig looking out the driver’s side rear window. For a time, Dad hauled sick pigs to the veterinarian in the back of that Buick. He tied them to spare tires and concrete blocks to keep them from escaping. He is a wizard with rope.

More familiar was the sight of Dad driving an old red truck with a broomstick sticking up from the bed with a well-worn rubber boot upside down on top of it. All Dad’s vehicles were scraped and scarred and seldom clean, but they functioned, which was what my old Ford was doing as I motored home Friday.

I had the window down and the radio at full blast so I could hear it over the traffic and my muffler, which has needed to be replaced for three years. As I blew by the two-toned blue water tower in Morton, the odometer turned to 114,000 miles. At least I didn’t have a sick pig in the back.

Tom Martin is editor of The Register-Mail in Galesburg, Ill. Contact him at 309-343-7181 Ext. 250 or tmartin@register-mail.com.